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Seven university lecturers were interviewed about the progress of one of their courses each week during one semester. The interview invited them to reflect on their planning and monitoring concerns as the course proceeded. Interviews were transcribed and content analysed using an emergent category system. Three topics recurred throughout the interviews: communication with students, ongoing course planning activities, and processes in class. The distribution of material in the other nine categories tended to be more idiosyncratic. This article provides a descriptive account of how and what these teachers thought, as a group, about the progress of a course, and it identifies the major issues on which their attention was focussed. The results are discussed in terms of how the teaching role of academics is primarily concerned with the communication of theoretical material to students. It is suggested that the debriefing interview technique is a useful tool for gathering data which can throw light on the educational beliefs and principles that underlie the practice of university teaching

Twenty-four members of the academic staff of an Australian university were interviewed in 1979 in order to seek their views on the ways in which their professional lives were being affected by the current recession in higher education. Their responses have been drawn upon to construct a picture of how this group of university teachers perceive their working environment and their own place within it. The comments cluster around seven topics: teaching, students, research, colleagues, career prospects, the university, and the quality of academic life. It is concluded that the responses suggest that there is a widening gap between academic ideals and institutional realities and that this will have a strongly negative effect upon the morale of the profession.

Earlier work on the enduring effects of education is reviewed and then data are presented from 22 autobiographical accounts written by graduates. Content analysis showed that most importance was attached to the learning of high-level intellectual skills and to attitudes and values of personal and professional significance. The implications of these findings for curricula and teaching methods in higher education are then discussed before considering the strengths and weaknesses of life history material as a research tool. It is concluded that written accounts combined with interviews offer a promising method for investigating the long-term impact of higher education.